Gender Differences in the Psychology of Parenting: Psychoanalytic and Feminist Perspectives

The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s has spurred a reevaluation of many issues about the psychology of women, resulting in fruitful areas of growth for analytic theory. A reconsideration of previous assumptions about normative female sexuality (Person, 1980), and a discovery of the sense of primary feminine gender identity prior to the oedipus complex (Stoller, 1977) are pertinent examples. The study of gender differences in parenting is another area which can significantly illuminate shortcomngs in our concepts of masculinity and femininity and offer new directions for theoretical research and clinical practice.

Some feminists argue that the position of contemporary women as primary or exclusive parents within the family has been a source of their social devaluation or psychological stunting (Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1976). They criticize psychoanalytic perspectives which have classically hypothesized an instinct for mothering in women, while ignoring the role of fatherhood for men. These feminists find such ideas and omissions to be sex biased, based on observations of a particular, patriarchal culture. Psychoanalysts, for their part, have found feminists unwilling to deal with the ambiguities of unconscious processes and too willing to force psychological theories to conform with their own biases about desirable social structures (Barglow and Schaefer, 1977). Our intent here is to review representative works